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SAP BusinessObjects Seminar: Insights from Chicago

by Kristin Bent

June 30, 2010

Last week, the SAP BusinessObjects seminar kicked off its five-city tour in Chicago. With the exception of some serious thunder and an afternoon tornado making our trip back to Boston a long and tiring one (WIS and Mother Nature have not been getting along lately), the seminar was a success. The three-day event drew a diverse crowd, ranging from executives, to consultants, to system admins and architects.

While on-site, I learned about the specific SAP projects the Chicago attendees are working on, where they are in the BusinessObejcts adoption curve, and – most importantly – their biggest painpoints. Interestingly enough, despite the unique mix of audience members, many expressed the same challenge: finding resources offering insight into both SAP and SAP BusinessObjects, and theintegration efforts required to bring the two together.

In other words, many attendees felt that, while there’s an abundance of resources and online communities supporting either SAP or SAP BusinessObjects users, it’s difficult to find one, all-encompassing source to not only help them use these tools more efficiently – but to use them together.

I’m sure time is a big factor here. Because SAP only acquired Business Objects a few years ago, some users are still familiarizing themselves with the extensive capabilities in the BusinessObjects suite – and vice versa. As these two communities merge over the years (or months, even), the number of resources outlining connectivity and integration best practices will most likely grow, allowing this knowledge gap to shrink.

You can already see this happening. The speakers for the SAP BusinessObjects seminar, in fact, seem to exemplify this very closing-of-the-gap; the knowledge they have, of both SAP and BusinessObjects, how they combine and play off of each other to create this robust – yet intuitive – reporting environment, is pretty incredible.

I would love to hear any other resources folks have stumbled upon that shed light on SAP, BusinessObjects, and how they can be leveraged, together. Or, stepping back for a moment, whether you think this knowledge gap even exists. Thoughts?

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COMMENTS

I attended Business objects seminar in Philadelphia it's not what i expected from the three day session. Many questions were not answered (time limits) and there is still so much pain that customers implmenting BO with BW have to re design their data models, queries. It is a known problem BW with BO still has performance issues and cannot handle operational reports, hierarchies, structures in queries.